Daily Search Forum Recap: October 8, 2009

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Don't Like A Google Search Result? Tell Them In The Forums
For the first time in my six plus years of reporting on search forums, I spotted a thread where Google has made a change to a specific query based on a thread. Of course, they make changes for porn or inappropriate search results, but never for standard issues with sites missing or pages missing from the results. That has changed with a Google Web Search Help where one user reported that his search for [site:whitehouse.gov

Google AdSense Login Issue Two Different Issues?
Yesterday, we reported of wide spread Google AdSense login issues. It seems like after receiving more information from Google on the matter, it might be two separate issues. One is a standard login issue for some accounts and the other is an issue with accounts that need to be migrated off their original email accounts. The second issue is known as a "migration loop" issue and there is a Google AdSense Help thread specifically about

Yahoo Drops The Meta Keywords Tag Also
It is official, no major search engines use the meta keywords tag for ranking purposes in their search algorithms. Yahoo's, matter of fact, announcement of this on Tuesday during the Ask The Search Engines: Best Practices Edition at SMX East conference was a bit of a shock. For a long time, the industry some what made fun of Yahoo for using it (at all) for ranking purposes. Then, during the Q&A period of the session,

Google Webmaster Tools Verification Files Now Accepted With Hidden HTML
Dennis from the Google Webmaster Central team informed us in a Google Webmaster Help thread that now, if you have comment code or extra HTML in the verification file used to verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools, it will allow you to verify the file. I guess some web servers added HTML to all files on their servers. Including the verification file used by Google to verify your site with Webmaster Tools. For example,

Google Wants To Index AJAX #!
During the CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO at SMX East yesterday, Bruce Johnson and Kathrin Probst from Google announced a new proposal for search engines to index AJAX. Let me explain the proposal in a very simplistic way, that honestly over simples it, but does give non-technical people an idea on what this does. AJAX is a form of advanced or rich JavaScript. Although Google does now look through JavaScript, AJAX often shows the

Extreme Racist Anti President Obama iGoogle Theme Available
Currently, there is a theme named NoBama in the iGoogle Theme directory that shows a picture of two confederate flags with President Obama hanging from a tree. Here is a picture of it: As you can imagine, this is an extremely offensive and outrageous theme to find on Google. There were two threads about this on Google Web Search Help where it was reported on October 5th. Jimmy from Google confirmed that this theme will